All The Truth About Plagiarism Check Software

Today’s technology is like a double-edged blade. When it comes to plagiarism, it can be seen as a blessing in disguise or a full-fronted curse. It’s easy nowadays to find a text that answers your subject and just paste it in your Word doc. But at the same time, it is also easy to track stolen content, making students wallow in despair all over the world.

Even those who purchase essay writing services are not safe from the terrors of plagiarism. While many essay writing websites can still offer texts with no plagiarized content from the very beginning, it’s still difficult to keep track. Imagine just how many papers they write daily; whether they want it or not, sometimes they can still slip and write by instinct the same thing they wrote in a previous essay. The plagiarism check software can catch that easily, and here you are, with a text that you didn’t even copy off the Internet, but you paid for it and it’s still plagiarized. However, you can find reliable essay writing services by going to EssayGuard.com.

Many rely on plagiarism detectors to discover the problematic areas. However, there are some things about these detectors that you didn’t know. Their limitations are greater than we can imagine, and truth be told, they don’t work just the way we thought they did.

Plagiarism detectors – what do they actually detect?

A car starter is used to start cars, while a dishwasher is used to wash dishes. But can plagiarism detectors be described as software to detect plagiarism? Well, not really. What the plagiarism check software actually does is to identify the same sections of text throughout a database. There are many websites that claim to detect any sort of plagiarism – however, the result is pretty much the same. What these detectors do is just find strings of identical texts between two different sources.

The principle is basically the same as Google’s search engine. You type in what you’re looking for, and the string of words you used will be associated with a website that has the same sentence structure. But keep in mind that these types of software have blind spots, which can either turn into false positives and false negatives,. They can check, they are useful, but how good are they actually?

Software limitations – even plagiarism detectors have it

Getting back to blind spots, we already mentioned that the plagiarism detecting software has its limitations. If you opt for free online plagiarism software, you should know that they can’t do wonders – they just look for the duplicate, the similar phrases. In other words, there are two areas where these tools are not particularly strong.

Common Phrases: While the plagiarism check software will try to detect and separate attributes, it won’t be possible with the variety of idioms and common phrases which will be just passed off as coincidental. Plus, many of them are specialized terms and phrases that must be there, so a detector won’t be able to differentiate between that.

Non-Verbatim Plagiarism: This usually involves text that was rewritten, redrafted or translated. These can’t be detected if you check it through a plagiarism software online for free, since they can only analyze the words, not the content. If you used synonyms and other similar techniques, the detector won’t have any way of knowing that you got that information from somewhere else.

The plagiarism check software is nothing magical; it is a mere machine and it can go through errors.

The human factor

There’s nothing that can detect plagiarism like a teacher who has read the same paper on and on from different students. Keep in mind that when a teacher hands over a topic to an entire class, you won’t be the only genius trying to get that info off the Internet. No matter how much you rephrase everything, you will still have the same info that half your class has. So, in this case, it will be like something this: Plagiarism detector – 0, Teacher – 1.

Long story short, plagiarism detectors are very useful, but they can‘t perform miracles. They can’t magically detect any kind of plagiarism, and errors are bound to happen. However, if used together with human judgment, they become a great tool. If utilized correctly, they can detect stolen text and protect you from the possibility of plagiarism.